FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

White House to Congress: Nice Economy You Have There. Be a Shame if Something Happened to It.

In the wake of the Obama administration’s brazen move earlier this week to bypass Congress and enact cap-and-trade via regulatory fiat, the Obama administration has now taken to actually threatening Congress to (further) harm the economy if Congress does not cover their backside by passing unwanted legislation.

The Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn’t move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a “command-and-control” role over the process in a way that could hurt business.

The warning, from a top White House economic official who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity, came on the eve of EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s address to the international conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark.

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But while administration officials have long said they prefer Congress take action on climate change, the economic official who spoke with reporters Tuesday night made clear that the EPA will not wait and is prepared to act on its own.

And it won’t be pretty.

“If you don’t pass this legislation, then … the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area,” the official said. “And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it’s going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty.”

Apparently, the White House feels that now is a good time to brazenly threaten to do enormous economic damage to our already depressed economy for the sake of scoring cheap political points against Congress. What a disgrace. Maybe once unemployment hits 15 or 20% the fifth-graders who run this administration will feel really tough about having made their point to all those pesky elected legislators. And then they will know, in the future, that if they don’t give Obama administration what it wants, the administration will just go ahead and take it anyway, and will harm their constituents in the process.